Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practices [2/23/2017] Matt Malpass

by Matt Malpass

Critical Design is becoming an increasingly influential discipline, affecting policy and practice in a range of fields. Matt Malpass's book is the first to introduce critical design as a field, providing a history of the discipline, outlining its key influences, theories and approaches, and explaining how critical design can work in practice through a range of contemporary examples. Critical Design moves away from traditional approaches that limit design's role to the production of profitable objects, focusing instead on a practice that is interrogative, discursive and experimental. Using a wide range of examples from contemporary practice, and drawing on interviews with key practitioners, Matt Malpass provides an introduction to critical design practice and a manifesto for how a radical and unorthodox practice might provide design answers in an age of austerity and ecological crisis.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction

Paperback

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is a great initial stab into documenting and presenting the first book of its kind of the origins and practices of Critical Design. I'm a recent graduate from ArtCenter College of Design's Media Design MFA program, which heavily employees methodology and exploration through the lenses of critical and speculative design. With that experience under my belt, I found the earlier sections of the book at times were fairly dry. However the theory and practice sections were far more invigorating and enlightening. The break down of the different modalities within critical design practices was very interesting and informative. It revealed many explanations that my grad program didn't explicitly address given it's open ended structure. The book was also at times very repetitive and the chapter's intros/conclusion were pretty unnecessary, in my opinion, because it was essentially the body of each chapter just reiterated. I believe if this book was edited down a bit it with that aforementioned point in mind, it would be even more digestible, impactful and to the point. Overall, I enjoyed reading this book in that it allowed me more insights as to how my field is becoming not only understood but more explicitly valued.

[Alper Çuğun · Rating 2 out of 5]

As somebody who was active in this field I felt I needed to read this book maybe just to see what it was all about.

There are issues at two levels here:

The book is a litany of examples taken from the field with some contextualization and filler added in between. The definition and model around the way we should think about critical design is better than not having anything but generally seems to me to be relatively arbitrary (as these things always are). As such the book is a useful period inventory—with texts like those you would write up in a gallery—but conceptually there isn't that much there.

The much more serious problem of a book like this is its lack of a critical (!) approach to the work it's treating. It rightly points out that this kind of work is very much at risk of being 'navel gazing' but does not diagnose that both its treatment and the subject matter do very little to break out of that frame. We are left with general prescriptions like "Critical design should [engage with others]" and more hollow words along those lines.

Here's my take after reading the book: Critical design has been a movement where designers tried to claw themselves up out of the purely visual realm into areas of more strategic consequence (the proverbial "seat at the table"). The work they produced remained almost entirely seated in the visual media and a lot of it was the non-functional aesthetization of pre-existing concepts from science-fiction and philosophy.

That would be fine so far but because the work was never functional in any real way it has not survived the reality vortex of the past five years where everything has turned into a work of fiction. Many startups are scams ('design fictions') of some sort and the high-concept rug pull is the currency of our techno-visual world. Is there space for critical design in a world where everything needs to be criticized but nothing can be? It doesn't look like it but that kind of reinvention is the core job of these practitioners and I'm curious to see what they come up with.

[Jeremy Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise and excellent introduction to critical design: how it grew out of previous movements, its relation to its variants and refinements (e.g., associative design, speculative design), and a taxonomy. While useful, the book was clearly written for a reader with more background than I. It provides many examples but a significant fraction take the form of the designer/artist's name and the name of the work, with some remarks, seemingly assuming the reader would be familiar and not require a detailed description.

[Ryan Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing look at design as a form of activism, somewhere between art and design, fighting for causes with irony and deeply insightful products. This is a great book and very influencial in my design practice.